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Month: October 2014

Whole Foods Market devotees already know that we sell some really great wines. Simply put, our curation team on that front is truly peerless. We’ve created a new WFM Wine Club subscription experience to capitalize on that unique expertise and to promote that offering, we have built a brand and responsive digital presence that communicates essence of the club is all about.

I acted as the design lead on the project from brand inception through digital design. I am telling that story here, showing both my design for the sub-brand’s mark and color palette as well as a bit of the process of how I brought the digital side of the project through concept to approval.

On that process :: I am a firm believer in taking a very Agile approach to the digital space. So often however, those agile principles are only applied to the development side of the equation. That’s a mistake, in my humble opinion. Agility can be applied through the creative concepting process as well, standing up multiple options that show the possibilities and allow for rapid iteration towards build. On this project, I took stakeholders through a style-tiling process, giving that balance of a solid view of potential futures while allowing us to iterate flexibly and quickly on the march to approval. That ended up being a pretty short march in this case. We were ready to head into full production design in just two meetings. That’s the process at its best!

Peter Saville was the Creative Director / Graphic Designer at the legendary Factory Records from its founding in 1978. His work for bands on the label like Joy Division, New Order, A Certain Ratio and Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark (among so many others) coupled with his post-Factory work for a full range of acts including Roxy Music, Ultravox, Duran Duran, King Crimson, Wham! and Peter Gabriel was nothing short of seminal. Just gorgeous, highly influential work that helped inform and shape so many of us in the field “of a certain age.” You can see a solid sampling of Mr. Saville’s work here :: http://www.hardformat.org/designers/peter-saville-designer/ — AND — http://www.petersaville.info/sleeves/

In tribute to Mr. Saville’s work and in the spirit of Mr. Saville’s sense of exploration, I have taken 25 classic albums and redesigned their album covers in answer to the question “WHAT IF THEY WERE ‘FACTORY?'” It is always VERY fruitful to explore a master’s work from the inside out like this. The awesome thing at this point in my career is that projects like this become a strong fusion of my own sensibilities and the master I am “conversing” with through the project.

One other note is that all of the photography in these designs is my own. I love to take photos and it was a ton of fun to purpose-shoot with these covers in mind.